Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

eldavojohn writes "Wired is running an informative article on Paypal Founder Peter Thiel's investment in seasteading. There's a great graphic indicating how the spar design helps platforms weather rough seas with a ballast. There's a lot more than just Thiel throwing the half million towards this and they hope to pitch this to San Fransisco for a bay pilot. Ocean colonies can be both liberating and also downright human-rights-lacking scary."

The real scary proposition represented in these platforms is the further breakdown of human society. The haves and have-nots of existing bad urban planning will be magnified. "Haves" on clean, platforms with exploited labour imported sans regulation and protection from the Philippines. "Have-nots" on the toxic-waste dumps of continental land - allowed to degrade and suffer.

This is a vision from H.G. Wells "The Time Machine". The moral problem with "Transhumanists" is that they regard human beings as expendable - in much the same way that 19th-century industrialists viewed drayage horses.

It is clear by now that we will not have the possibility for independent space colonization anytime soon. Seasteading is the best bet for those of us who feel that the status quo of society is not good enough.

Living in a society is about compromise and respect for other peoples opinions and beliefs. Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue. Most of the problems societies have are when these groups get too powerful.

Frankly sending them all out into the middle of the ocean sounds like a great idea. Living accommodations optional.

I look forward to ejecting the ethical detrius of society, onto remote platforms. What could be more ideal? Isolating together, that element that believes all of existance should revolve around the desires and foibles of "me".

What a doom! to be forced to live in isolation with a bunch of other "visionaries", who believe that the works of Ayn Rand are literature, and expound a philosophy.

I understand that this is your viewpoint. But you should know that it is not a tolerant one. It's more of a "either you're with us or you're against us" attitude.I feel like you're saying that since this is a democracy, the majority viewpoint should dictate all behaviors. While agree that some standards must be set, I don't agree that anyone should expected to submit to governmental authority. Especially not when it comes to personal issues such as drug-use or sex (ironically, I don't use drugs or have

Groups inside a society who have no tolerance for other views are a serious issue.

The inverse, groups that cannot be tolerated by society can be problematic as well. Giving the Puritans land far far from the rest of England was just as much a blessing to England as the Puritans. Any modern day cult that builds a compound in the middle of nowhere could be said to tolerate other's views, but they don't really fit in so well when we find that they are like to marry 14 year old girls to 45 year old men. But out in the middle of the ocean, it wouldn't really bother us anymore. Or would it? Would the American people allow such a society to sit just off our shores? What about a cannabis farming floating island anchored just north of Bermuda, do you think Uncle Sam would let them alone? I don't think these floating islands are going to be the escape from global government/society that many want them to be.

I'm not sure seasteading is necessarily the best bet. Creating artificial islands might be more feasible than creating floating platforms. There are a vast number of seamounts just under the ocean's surface (ie: within 20 meters) that lie well outside any territorial waters of nations, particularly in the southwestern Pacific and the mid-atlantic. I'm not sure the advantages of mobility offered by seastead platforms outweigh the advantages of building up from the seafloor itself. And don't get locked into thinking this could only be done by building a tower down from the surface. For a a relatively modest cost (hundreds of millions), artificial islands make from deposited rubble just like the projects in Dubai could be undertaken in hundreds of locations worldwide.

That is the problem. Everybody has there idea of what a free and open society would be. The problem is they all tend to biased one what we think is right or wrong.Some would like to ban any oppression by religious groups. But they feel that the mention of religion or the statment that my religion is better than yours or your lack of religion is oppressive. Of course they themselves have no problem with people saying that a total lack of religion is better than having one.Just about everyone's vision of Utop

That is the problem. Everybody has there idea of what a free and open society would be. The problem is they all tend to biased one what we think is right or wrong.Some would like to ban any oppression by religious groups. But they feel that the mention of religion or the statement that my religion is better than yours or your lack of religion is oppressive. Of course they themselves have no problem with people saying that a total lack of religion is better than having one.Just about every-one's vision of Ut

Strictly speaking it doesn't mean nowhere - clearly the term utopia has come to mean something quite different since More wrote Utopia 400 odd years ago.It's certainly true that he meant "no place" at the time; the society that he envisioned was put up as a lame duck imho.

An example up of this, and one of my favorite bits in the book is when King Utopus says that it's pointless trying to explain to people how such a society (Utopia) could work - one would have to see it at close hand. Obviously the place is

I'd amend that as "as long as there are those who are both greedy and short sighted there will never be utopia." Enlightened self interest usually coincides with everyone else's self interest.

Enlightenment aside, human nature is not static. We have several stable states, selfishness being one of them. In a society that encourages selfishness, does not allow the common person the ability to easily punish unfairness. If everyone around you is being selfish, chances are you will be, too, because you have to, or be taken advantage of. But if everyone around you is being cooperative, you most likely will act that way, too. So human society has an impact on human nature. Which is the point of utopias.

Google Henry George for one practical and tested method of doing this.

Wiki's article [wikipedia.org] on him says he was anti Chinese immigrant. Besides newspapers, that's some he shared with William Randolph Hearst [wikipedia.org]. During WWII besides the Japanese Hearst wanted to put the Chinese and all other Asian into internment camps.

Utopia is not an option. On the other hand, free markets and private property limit the negative effects of greed and turn it into a positive externality.

Prove it. From what I've seen, free markets allow greedy and selfish people to accumulate more money than cooperative people. Money is force. With enough money, one can manipulate markets. This allows the greedy to attack the rest of us economically, to force us into servitude.

By encouraging greed and discouraging cooperation, a free market system ensures that everyone will have to act in a greedy and selfish fashion in order not to be taken advantage of by the greedy and selfish.

There are two basic ways to make money. The one you illustrate nicely in your post is service, labor, intellectual effort etc. I.e. the work you do. The other you don't mention: controlling resources. Many very wealthy and powerful people gained their wealth by this second method and I think it can be reasonably argued that said wealth is often NOT from serving the interests of others.

There's a lot of technology that would go into making these colonies, and the elements would actually be less threatening to them than a seaside city. If you think about it, if you become submerged just a few feet (maybe 20-100), a lot of your problems go away. As for thieves, they wouldn't be deterred much by this, but you can always have local police. My bet is that these colonies can be the next Atlantis if someone finds a cheep way to use the local resources to make sturdy building material (something l

My bet is that these colonies can be the next Atlantis if someone finds a cheep way to use the local resources to make sturdy building material (something like nanites that turn the sand into quartz). However that is a LONG way off.

Once upon a time, I read a book which addressed this issue, albeit for a different seafaring concept. It involved using manganese (I seem to recall) bars in a mesh, which, when electricity was run through it, would accrete calcium carbonate to it from seawater. Eventually, this would create a shell on which the colony would float, and from which further accretions could expand it.

The concept also involved leveraging temperature differentials in seawater to generate electricity, and using the immediate vicinity of colonies to farm algae, etc. Using these colonies as a hub of a hydrogen economy was also envisioned.

These ideas made it into a website for the Living Universe Foundation, but I don't recall if the book had any connection to them or not.

I read it too. The book was called "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps". At the end of the book, the author called for the formation of "The First Millennial Foundation" in order to advance the project that he had outlined. The FMF later changed their name to "The Living Universe Foundation".

Exactly.. storms and quakes are dangerous enough on land. And while there may not necessarily be physical assets worth plundering (because rich people never keep their valuables on hand, I guess), there are still protection rackets, hostage/ransom situations, and random violence to contend with, and as a wealthy independent nation, you'd be ripe for all of the above.

You'd have low volume, high cost, and high reliance on imports, with little to nothing to export, except perhaps intellectual property (with no means to protect), assuming you even believe in IP as a libertarian. Satellite internet is high latency, low bandwidth, and most people would probably be dissatisfied with such limited connection to the outside world.

Cabin fever is all but guaranteed, and an active social life is basically out of the question. You'd have to worry about mutiny, sabotage, fires, fresh water supply, leaks, maintenance, and all the other concerns of a seagoing vessel, without the convenience of being able to pull into a port if things get hairy. In short, it seems like the disadvantages seriously outweigh any advantage of pseudo-independence (pseudo, since you're still reliant on the outside world to A) play nice, and B) supply you with durable goods and consumables).

But what do I know? I've only spent 6 years in the Navy, and 6 years living on a small island.. not like I've had any relevant experience.

No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.... A man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company. (Boswell's Life of Johnson)

And this would be worse than a boat. At least a boat is designed to go somewhere else.

Unless you can somehow boot strap this into some huge city sized complex ($$$, 500K isn't even earnest money), it's not g

Not if you do it right. Hook a bunch of barges together and create a giant floating mass that is as inflexible as possible so that the surface is basically the average of all the waves that are hitting it at that moment (which should average out to approximately a constant height above the ocean floor). Drop an anchor in the middle. You shouldn't move much more than an island does so long as the length of the total surface is dozens of typical wavelengths long. About the only thing you'd have to worry a

Tsunamis have wavelengths of hundreds of kilometers and wave heights of only a few feet in open ocean. That means the rig would lift a foot or two, and then go back down once 200 or 300 km of the wave has passed. You would never know it unless somebody told you.
Now a hurricane, on the other hand - you've got massive winds there.

I know you're being funny. So with that said, here are the options for receiving mail when you are a cruiser.
1) You use a forwarding service to send all mail to a country that you are heading to.
2) You use other cruisers as a forwarding network (this is how they did mail transfer back in the day as well, if you recall).
Both are surprisingly effective, though non-intuitively you tend to miss more mail with option #1 than #2.
In light of the discussion, though, coordinates for your floating country plu

Apart from the "let's start a country where we're the government" possibility, I think there are a number of other more likely applications if this really is a more cost-effective and efficient way of establishing a habitable community at sea.

Scientific research, tourism, even resource extraction could benefit from a better way of building sea platforms.

You need to compute the value, whenever looking at new commune/ collective/ arcology/ society construction. This is in some ways a non-numeric computation, but you should at least look at the basic per capita cost, e.g., cost(infrastructure + risk) / population. Many managers focus on one but ignore the other, but any cost-benefit study must look at both. One offset to the cost would be the value of goods or services produced by the population.

A yurt in a comfortable biome houses a small self-sufficient family at nearly no cost. A small crew can man an offshore oil rig (at least, in moderate shifts) because of the immense value of the product. A commune living in a multi-hundred-ton cylinder of concrete and steel floating a dozen miles offshore had better have some damn valuable product to overcome the huge costs of infrastructure and risk.

A commune living in a multi-hundred-ton cylinder of concrete and steel floating a dozen miles offshore had better have some damn valuable product to overcome the huge costs of infrastructure and risk.

Unless, of course, the members of said commune are filthy stinking rich, in which case they can afford the infrastructure costs without having it produce anything other than shelter... Just like the rest of us do when we buy a house.

A commune living in a multi-hundred-ton cylinder of concrete and steel floating a dozen miles offshore had better have some damn valuable product to overcome the huge costs of infrastructure and risk

Well, seeing as value is subjective, here are some potential ones for starters:

Hands-on research for future ventures into seasteadingA place of business independent from international law -- this alone may be worth millions and millionsSite for research into renewable energySite for research into carbon sequest

Do you seriously think the established nation states of this world are just going to let a bunch of platforms float outside their jurisdiction and reach?

In fact, nations don't even have to do anything about their landmass, they can simply apply their laws to their citizens in international waters, and they can enforce them there too. So, if you are a US or European citizen, you'll still be subject to DMCA, high taxes, and drug laws. Of course, you can give up all your citizenships, but then you'd have a hard time doing business with anybody on land.

This kind of escapism just doesn't help. Either fix your own nation or stop complaining. Running away stopped being an option when the West was settled, and it won't be an option again until we figure out FTL travel.

This kind of escapism just doesn't help. Either fix your own nation or stop complaining. Running away stopped being an option when the West was settled, and it won't be an option again until we figure out FTL travel.

You know, for many people it simply isn't an option any more. What are the legal means you have in the USA - you can vote locally, for congress senate and the President.

Let's face it, for all federal elections (where most power is concentrated these days) you get two choices, which are virtually the same person when it comes down to it.

If you really intend to "fix your own nation" you virtually have to dedicate your entire life to doing so.

It is simply unfair to condemn people because they haven't "fixed their own nation" in the face of their compatriots' ignorance and big-government vested interest. It could be argued that it makes more sense to run away to sea - it may be more efficient!

I think what is worse is that they are painting these spar platforms as something completely new. Oil platforms in deep water have been doing this for years. [worleyparsons.com] They're somewhat rare but are one of the best solutions in very deep water. The great downside is that to move them, you generally have to lift the topsides (living areas, oil production and working areas) off of the spar with an enormous crane and then tow the cylinder section lying down.

Insightful, yet incorrect. The 'tologists at the helm of El Ron had a similar idea about having a colony at sea; named Sea Org, or some such nonsense, follow the wiki-link if you really care to. The tie in is appropriate as the summarizer decided to mention both types of motives for moving to a sea colony; for freedom from oppressive governments, or to further your power over stupid people who follow convincing, well spoken lunatics. Fair is fair, I think Peter is quite a lunatic too. Pay "Pal" blows!

Maintaining a steady stream of spite towards scientology isn't the worst thing, as long as it doesn't interfere with the topic at hand too much. It's just sometimes hard to get off your mind after hearing the most gruesome stories, so subtle (or not-so-subtle) references are going to creep in now and then.

Seems akin to the Atlantis Project [oceania.org], which hoped to build the city of Oceania from floating concrete-and-air hexagonal platforms. Sounded promising, but alas no artificial islands have come of it yet.

Word is there exists the Great Pacific Garbage Patch [google.com] which is the accumulation of seaborne trash into a blob somewhere on par with Texas in size.Now work with me here...That's a whole lotta floating stuff already in a relatively stable position (occupying a major ocean current vortex); surely an inventive aspiring frontiersman could turn that mass of materials into an inhabitable floating island. Material acquisition & relocation is already mostly taken care of, as there's a Texas-sized mass of it already there. Much of it is plastic, which should be easily (for the "news for nerds" crowd) reformed on-site into more suitable structures. It's already in a stable vortex, so it's not going to be unmanagably mobile, and remains well outside any nation's claimable waters. There may already be sufficiently compacted sections to stand on & start work from.

For several years ocean researcher Charles Moore has been investigating a concentration of floating plastic debris in the North Pacific Gyre. He has reported concentrations of plastics on the order of 3,340,000 pieces/sq km with a mean mass of 5.1kg/sq km collected using a manta trawl with a rectangular opening of 0.9m x 0.15m at the surface.

5.1kg/km is not much. You'd have to scoop a hell of a big area just to get as much mass as the boat you're scooping with. I think you're overestimating the amount of debris and the size of the pieces.

While he article touches on a lot of the obvious issues (piracy, sovereignty, etc), they seem to have missed this episode of Family Guy.

For the purpose of discussion, here's a short list of other issues that don't seem that trivial to me:

1) No natural resources. Or in other words, there's nothing there that anyone wants. You might be able to grow your own food and harvest the necessities from the sea, but you can basically forget about having any exports. This would be a deficit economy just about any way you shake it.

2) Environment is fatal to humans. Should the platform sink, everybody dies. Few of the places on earth with this level of lethality house humans for any real length of time without some really compelling reason to be there (see above...)

3) 'Nation problems'. Without any allies, any nation can declare war on you and sink you. You're a nation now, so you're expected to play at that level. Likewise, your neighbor on his own platform can declare war on you - he's running a nation, too. PirateBay platform, meet the RIAA platform... Do you plan to appeal to the United Nations? Can you even do that if you're not a member? What about trade agreements? There's really a LOT to consider here.

4) 'Hot button' nations. Can Osama float a platform and no longer be considered a terrorist, rather a dictator? What about those pedo-polygamists? Can't they just float a platform and go right on forcing marriage and sex on pre-teens? And if this is possible, wouldn't others want desperately to sink them? Or, if not sink you could they not simply blockade you, or otherwise apply pressure to cut you off from the outside world?

I guess what I'm trying to say is: Nations are nations because of where they are and what they have, not merely because of their desire to be independent.

Peter eventually caved. He didn't even manage to get an ink-pen for his trouble...

While he article touches on a lot of the obvious issues (piracy, sovereignty, etc)

He touches on them, but he doesn't address them to any degree. Which isn't surprising because many of the proponents of these projects are a bit vague and handwavish on the details themselves. To take the two issues you mention:

Sovereignty - these colonies are no more sovereign than a condominium complex. In fact, legally speaking, (though IANAL) they appear to be little more than condominiums. There's a fairly good size

Not true. Such a platform could be built around OTEC structure that would provide fresh water and power. It's conceivable that they could export energy. Other forms of energy production could include wind, solar, wave, and perhaps even hydrocarbon (farming seaweed and such for combustion and/or fuel creation).

Imagine a platform that made diesel from harvested seaweed (which would be plentiful around an OTEC device) via TCP and sold the diesel to passing ships. The ships could get by with less fuel stored u

OK lets assume for a moment there is demand for this.Who controls the "spur"? If 45% want to not defect, 30% want to defect to Constellation B and 25% want to defect to Constellation C, who gets it?

What happens when 51% of the spur decides left handed people should have to primarily use their right hand from now on? Or they get shot in the face. Or maybe instead of 51% I just mean the security force who just took over. Or the pirates who decided they wanted a nice home.

"There's a history of a lot of crazy people trying this sort of thing, and the idea is to do it in a way that's not crazy," said Joe Lonsdale, the institute's chairman and a principal at Clarium Capital Management, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund.

So, to be clear, the idea's not crazy, just everyone who's tried it so far. Hmmm.

Seasteads are a great way to protect human rights because they protect the most fundamental human right, the one from which all others are derived: The right to vote with your feet.

If all you do is ensure that anyone can leave any time they want, then you have only one remaining ingredient to support this most fundamental human right:

Somewhere to go.

With the current, very limited, number of territories world-wide, the choices available to refugees is limited not only by the number of territories that would welcome them, but by the absolute number of territories.

Increase the baseline number of territories and freedom reigns.

The problem with current conceptions of "human rights" is they are enumerated in some sort of unstructured laundry list which results in the entire edifice crumbling under stress. Its tragic because the more you "feel" various things are "rights" -- the more "rights" you put on your wishful-thinking-list, the more "righteous" you sound to the intellectually handicapped. This creates a terrible situation for humanity -- where facades of "human rights" displace the need for territory -- the need for carrying capacity -- that forms the real foundation of life hence humanity hence their rights.

I've written up some thoughts on the nuances of a more rationally architected system supporting human rights in Deep Libertarianism: Human Ecology [majorityrights.com] that allows jurisdictions to become as "tyrannical" as they want over their territory, so long as they let people leave at will and support the creation of carrying capacity for the formation of volulntary association.

Seasteading is an important potential in this direction.

Unfortunately, Google's Patri Friedman, while far better than most, is indulging in more of the sloppy thinking that endangers human rights when he says things like "You can change your government without having to leave your house" or implies the assumption that seasteading jurisdictions will not exclude immigrants at their whim. We live in a physical universe with ecologies that operate in space. Attempting to deny spatial structure because you find it inconvenient or even "oppressive" is simply fantasy.

There's something to the idea of increasing choice, but I don't think the biggest barrier to free mobility for most people is finding a better place to live - it's having to uproot your entire life to move elsewhere. The older you get, the harder it gets to just take off and leave.

Then again, maybe societies designed to be in constant flux would be easier to leave. It depends on how much your life is attached to the physical location of where you live, and the people who share it with you. The latter is w

Its bad enough living on small islands, where the energy cost of transportation is so inefficient compared to mainland cities.

Where would you go if you wanted to walk on a hill? Frankly I'd rather be part of a "Red Mars" mission than this.

It's kind of a sad reflection on the kind of society we would live in if Ayn Rand inspired techno-geeks ruled the world. Do none of them appreciate the social infrastructure than allowed them to spend their time inventing stuff, instead of living the life of a frontiersman foraging for food and dying of disease. Private 737 anyone?

Spend the research money on tech to save the environment we have. If we were meant to live ON the sea, god would have given us gills and a taste for our urine...

Ah, there it is in TFA, with the same link."The most ambitious was Marshall Savage's Aquarius Project, which aimed at nothing less than the colonization of the universe."

The first section of the book describes massive floating islands created by concrete accreted from seawater using electricity derived from temperature differentials. Entertaining as science fiction, a long shot as far as actual science.

The first thing this article brought to my mind is the China Mieville novel "The Scar" which deals with a decidedly dystopian floating city (complete with vampires and other goodies) in a decidedly dystopian world. Quite a fun read but probably not resembling at all what anyone has in mind to try to build.

These spar dwellings are designed to minimize the effects of normal wave action on the vessel/building's stability. But what about in a hurricane?

What's the wave action like a few meters below the surface during a hurricane? Could one of these spars just submerge for the day or so it takes a hurricane to pass, leaving just air pipes and sensors floating on the surface to get wracked by the storm? Or are the waters below also treacherously gyrating all around the storm's visible action above the surface?

Patri Friedman, grandson of [Nobel Laureate] Milton and son of anarcho-theorist David, is even today actively planning to launch artificial sea platform communities, which he's calling seasteads, currently hoping to start one in San Francisco Bay. That's the spirit of America, as John Adams never quite said: may I advocate classical-liberal limited government, so that my son may advocate anarcho-capitalism, and that my grandson may plan to build new artificial countries in the ocean.

Having spent about 40% of the last 2 decades out on various oceans on oil rigs, I look at this and I think "who's going to repair the pumps in the ballast pontoons when they don't work".And "Who's going to shovel the rotting shit out of the plumbing system when it blocks up. Including that razor blade that you so forgetfully threw down the shitter last week?"And "Who's going to paint the underside of the helideck, before it rusts through from beneath?"

There are a LOT of skills necessary to running any machine on the high seas. Which means that your libertarian "Sea Steaders" are going to need a considerable staff on board, or easily on call. regardless of the weather.

Also, having spent a moderate amount of time at sea in 60ft waves and 150+km/hr winds (you know - when you get bodily picked up by the wind and are very careful to keep both lifelines hooked on), I wonder who's going to repair the switch gear for the "making way" motors when they're turned on for the first time in 3 years. Oh, Mr SeaSteader is going to be that conscientious about his maintenance jobs? Which government is going to provide the air-sea rescue when something goes pear-shaped?

The critters dump their organic waste into the water, where it is recycled by other critters. Why shouldn't the humans? (They already do it on ocean-going vessels. Blackwater is an issue on land and enclosed waterways, not in mid ocean.)

For non-biodegradable waste: Jetsam dumped overboard in deep water won't be an issue for geologic time. That leaves flotsam, which would have to be dealt with in more ordinary ways. (Fortunately, that's a small amount of the waste and mostly imported anyhow. So it can be shipped out to some place that can handle it.)

At most latitudes there's lots of wind available, with no mountains, trees, and buildings to slow it down. (Sometimes there's a bit more wind than you'd like.)

If you want to settle the "horse latitudes" (where there's rarely wind), there's plenty of solar power. And a handy way to tap it is to pump up cold water from deeper down and run a heat engine on the temperature difference between it and the upper-level water. Then you dump the nutrient-rich deep water locally and farm the resulting massive explosion of plants and critters.

The idea that purchasing a flag of convenience will providing meaningful protection seems a bit naive..

Flags of convenience are a protection against GOVERNMENT predation. (Which is essentially the point of this whole exercise.)

Will every citizen be a trained firefighter? Who will provide emergency medical services?

The same sort of people who provide such services on ocean-going vessels or in houses in very rural areas. These are already solved problems - with solutions that vary depending on the size of the community and the degree of its location's isolation.

Then you dump the nutrient-rich deep water locally and farm the resulting massive explosion of plants and critters.

You're talking about deliberate manipulation of complex ecological systems. The idea of pulling this off without significant negative ramifications leaves me quite skeptical. (If you can cite some examples of this being done successfully, I'd be interested to see it). To anyone thinking you can simply dump nutrients into the ocean, and have more fish appear, I'd say they need to study a bit more about eutrophication. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication [wikipedia.org] More isn't better, and there is a point at